SiPy Sigfox Antenna link quality

doing a test today sending data every 20 seconds( where i live the sigfox signal is not everywhere) on my way to work. i saw on my back end that the atmel device was able to send around 15 messages and my Sipy only 2.

is there any way to improve the link quality? on the sigfox backend i get

First of all apologies for the long delay with this. We have solved this problem with the latest firmware (1.6.13.b1). The issue is a bit complex and it's not because of a firmware bug, it's more because of an undocumented characteristic of the Sigfox network in RCZ2 and RCZ4:

There are 9 macro-channels with 2 micro-channels on each of of those 2 zones. However (and this is the undocumented part), only the first macro-channel is actually usable (for the time being). The Sigfox library itself behaves in a way that only the packets sent on the first macro-channel are transmitted properly (and the Sigfox library is a blackbox to anyone outside of Sigfox). The solution to this is to either call sigfox.reset() after every 2 transmissions and then wait 20s before transmitting again in order to comply with FCC regulations, or, as we have implemented it, handle this delay internally and only apply the amount of delay (if any) needed in order to comply. This latter approach is the one that we have preferred and therefore there's nothing to do at user code level besides knowing that more than 2 consecutive transmissions will have a delay in between. This is now documented in: https://docs.pycom.io/pycom_esp32/library/network.Sigfox.html

This characteristics of the Sigfox network are not tested during the Sigfox certification phase and also not very well documented, which is why it took us so long to fix it.

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still having issues here in Houston. Could you check the signal integrity here in houston, or how many antennas they have.. i have not been able to get that information from them. but you guys have more leverage.

@iotmaker I think your issues might be related with the config word. What Sigfox config word are you using on the Atmel dev kit? Perhaps setting this same config word on the SiPy will lead you to having the same results. The config word configures the channels that are used for the uplinks, which might explain the you only received 2 messages from the SiPy during your initial side by side comparison.